Mutter_schafft – von un/sichtbarer Hausarbeit im Schöner Wohnen Magazin der 1970er-Jahre

Abstract

Housework and its representations are made in/visible within the visual structure of the living magazine Schöner Wohnen. A binary gender_gap is established and reproduced between the pages and their assemblage of images and texts. This essay examines the gendered bodies of housework that appear in the Schöner Wohnen magazine, as well as in feminist art of the 1970s, and questions their embedding in discourses of gender and dwelling. The visual structures that make manual labour in/visible within the technical interior of the housework are analysed, based on two objects: The Candy, a washing machine advertisement that appears in the Schöner Wohnen, and Die Geburtenmadonna (1976), a work of the artist Valie Export that unveils visual patterns of patriarchal narratives.